Thirdspace

Contemporary critical studies have recently experienced a
significant spatial turn. In what may eventually be seen as one of
the most important intellectual and political developments in the
late twentieth century, scholars have begun to interpret space and
the embracing spatiality of human life with the same critical
insight and emphasis that has traditionally been given to time and
history on the one hand, and social relations and society on the
other. Thirdspace is both an enquiry into the origins and
impact of the spatial turn and an attempt to expand the scope and
practical relevance of how we think about space and such related
concepts as place, location, landscape, architecture, environment,
home, city, region, territory, and geography.

The book's central argument is that spatial thinking, or what
has been called the geographical or spatial imagination, has tended
to be bicameral, or confined to two approaches. Spatiality is
either seen as concrete material forms to be mapped, analyzed, and
explained; or as mental constructs, ideas about and representations
of space and its social significance. Edward Soja critically
re-evaluates this dualism to create an alternative approach, one
that comprehends both the material and mental dimensions of
spatiality but also extends beyond them to new and different modes
of spatial thinking.

Thirdspace is composed as a sequence of intellectual and
empirical journeys, beginning with a spatial biography of Henri
Lefebvre and his adventurous conceptualization of social space as
simultaneously perceived, conceived, and lived. The author draws on
Lefebvre to describe a trialectics of spatiality that threads
though all subsequent journeys, reappearing in many new forms in
bell hooks evocative exploration of the margins as a space of
radical openness; in post-modern spatial feminist interpretations
of the interplay of race, class, and gender; in the postcolonial
critique and the new cultural politics of difference and identity;
in Michel Foucault's heterotopologies and trialectics of space,
knowledge, and power; and in interpretative tours of the Citadel of
downtown Los Angeles, the Exopolis of Orange County, and the
Centrum of Amsterdam.